The tariffs stood at 25% before the start of the trade war, making this an overall cut.

“The fact that Xi is dumping a policy that has his name all over it is huge,” Hemmings said of the Made in China reversal.

He added that the new willingness to play ball with Trump on trade amounted to a “very slow incremental cave-in on the tariff war.”

Huawei on its knees

On the surface, these favourable developments seem to follow a pleasant dinner on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina, where Trump and Xi talked trade and left with a 90-day period to iron out their differences and perhaps to get all tariffs removed.

But just after the dinner, the US had Canada detain the CFO of the Chinese tech giant Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of smartphones, on allegations of bank fraud.

Both countries cited security concerns, with Huawei largely seen as an extension of the Chinese government that many fear will spy on the West.

In response, Huawei sought to get back on the West’s good side.

“Anything needed to do this transformation we are committed to do this,” Vincent Peng, the head of Huawei in Western Europe,told the Financial Times. “Restructure the organisation, rebuild the processes, rebuild the products … Process, personal skills, engineering capability, anything,” he added.

“Chinese tech guys realise if they don’t have access to US markets and components,” they could go bankrupt within days, said Hemmings, the analyst.

The day after Canada detained Meng, global stocks tumbled for fear that the trade talks would run astray. But that didn’t happen.

This theft, which the US alleges that China carries out via forced technology transfers, espionage, and cybercrime, greatly overshadows any trade deficit.

China may have been willing to sweep the tariffs under the rug to ease US pressure on its tech ambitions, according to Hemmings.

“China still has grand geopolitical ambitions to which its industrial and tech companies are a big part of,” Hemmings said.

“Xi seems to have taken a hit personally” by scaling back the grand Made in China ambitions, he said, “but we’ll see how real it is on the ground, whether tech transfers actually stop.”

The most recent major set of US negotiations with China closely resembled those involving North Korea. On that score, Trump held a feel-good meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with broad talk of denuclearization that hasn’t even come close to happening six months later.

Perhaps cooler heads in China watching this display feel they can throw Trump a few positive headlines, take a face-losing defeat, and then press on with a plot most experts agree has the end goal of replacing the US as the world’s great superpower.